I have had a MacBook for a couple of months now, I love love love the Touch Bar and use it hundreds of times a day. I've never once used it to pick an emoticon.
I've never heard anyone call it an "emoticon bar".
Emoticon and
Emoji are
not two different names for the same thing. Emoticons are smiley faces made out of sequences of text characters (mostly punctuation), which originated on Arpanet and Usenet (predecessors of the Internet) in the early 80's, while Emoji are little special-purpose graphical symbols of faces and such, that originated from Japanese cell phones in the late 90's (originally with incompatible implementations on each carrier). Use of Emoji has since expanded considerably and they have therefore (quite reasonably) been added to the official
Unicode character set standard which has been repeatedly amended with still more Emoji (because people keep saying, "if we have Emoji for X and Y, surely we should also have Z" - I don't agree with this logic, but it appears to be a bell we can't unring).
And every time the
Unicode Consortium adds new Emoji to the Unicode standard, and Apple implements the latest Unicode standard (as it should - it is
the standard for how to represent all text in a uniform way), and MacRumors posts about it, a certain contingent of MacRumors readers have a conniption, because the
graphic artists at Apple who drew the graphics for the latest Emoji should clearly be
building the next MacBook instead. These readers have built up a long hatred for Emoji, so, since the Touch Bar on the latest laptops
can show Emoji, what better way to channel their rage than by dubbing it the "Emoji Bar".
I have an entirely different reason to dislike the Touch Bar - as an old-school Unix programmer, I need an Escape key, because I use it thousands of times a day (mostly in Vim/MacVim). It has to work
without looking, it has to work
every time, and it's
much better if it gives tactile feedback that: a) you're touching the key but you haven't pressed it yet; and, b) yep, you've pressed it now. The touch bar fails on both of these - there is no distinction between touching the virtual Escape key and using it (you can't rest your finger on it waiting for the right moment to press it), and there's no tactile feedback that you have indeed pressed it (i.e. pressing to the right of the "key" and getting either nothing, or whatever icon happens to appear there at the moment,
feels exactly the same as "pressing" the Escape "key"). If they had a physical Escape key at the left end of the bar, TouchID at the right end, and their touch strip in between, I'd be fine with that, but a virtual Escape key is a
mediocre substitute for a physical Escape key. (Non-programmers may not see this as a big deal - imagine if they eventually went to an
entirely touch bar keyboard on the Mac - it would open up fabulous possibilities for gestures and key reassignment based on current context, and it would
completely kill touch typing, you'd have to look at your hands while you type instead of at the screen.)
